Backronyms and puns

[LongRunner]

The U.S.A.: Unbelievably Stupid Arseholes

I'm not sure any more words need to be minced about them:
I find it seriously hard to believe that anyone sincerely thinks the United States of America are still a great (or even decent) country.

[LongRunner]

Grenada (Seagate 7200.14) = Grenade
(I know it's a cheap pun…)

[LongRunner]

Dimplex = Dumbplex
I have ample evidence that for a "reputable" brand (or so they might have been in decades past), they're downright disgraceful now.
You might as well just buy an actual cheapo; at least you'll get what you pay for that way.

[LongRunner]

Arda (appliances) = Anti-repair design atrocities (see here)
Bose = Bogus overpriced sound equipment

[LongRunner]

Bird (scooter rental) = Burst into rage dramatically
(That was my reaction to their completely glitched-out app; I can deal with bad engineering, one way or another, but bad programming is one of the few things which can really take away my cool. I'm so glad to be out of IT proper… Anyway Beam's scooter app works fine, so I'll be riding them once I get the hang of it.)

[LongRunner]

IEC = Incessant Extortion Continuation

IEC drawing fail.png (260.26 KiB) Viewed 31750 times

They charge how much for these wonky drawings again?

To be fair, most of the national standards bodies are equally greedy; that's monopoly for you. I'll see if I can do better…

[LongRunner]

Ninebot = Buynot

From the start my G65 MAX didn't perform up to expectations (having less grunt than the Beam scooters even in sport mode, and hardly moving at all in the default Eco mode), and the provided C5 cord was defective. Then the rear tyre kept going flat, which turned out to be a faulty valve (I found a bit of fluff in a split in the rubber, apparently from the factory); worst of all, the spare valve Ninebot sells doesn't fit the wheel, and they don't provide the correct type either

So I've lost the morale to continue trying to fix it, and will look at other brands once our old house sells.
I can only guess the Beam scooters perform better because Beam actually hold Segway-Ninebot to their specification, unlike these retail models

[LongRunner]

RamToggle = ShamToggle: They're less reliable than proper wall-plugs, as if the screw goes in at an angle, nothing exists to guide it back to straight, so it can miss the center hole of the wings.

[LongRunner]

Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 = Cheetah 10K.U6 (yes, that U6)

From a company whose 7200rpm (S)ATA drives of the time remain probably the most reliable HDDs ever made to this day (regardless of cost or specifications), you'd have expected more effort than this – at the very least they could have used FDBs (already standard in the Barracuda ATA IV a year prior) rather than hanging onto BBs until the bitter end. I could forgive the resultant outer-zone crash if the drive ran for 10 years, but 5.3 years is nowhere near enough margin for comfort.

Besides the bearings, you can see there that the 10K.6 also has an aluminium voice-coil, bare copper lands on the PCB, and a crude pressed-on spindle clamp.
The Barracuda ATA IV and V have a copper voice-coil, HASL-finished PCB (with impeccable soldering ) and a 6-screw spindle clamp.
(Anyway the 10K.6 shown appears to have lead-free solder – but the Barracudas were durable enough to deserve leaded solder; the 10K.6 wasn't.)

If the pun wasn't enough of a hint – it's sad to say, but I think the Cheetah 10K.6 was no more reliable than the U Series
(And at least the U6 drives died peacefully by media degradation, rather than their heads crashing on the platters wobbling on knackered bearings…)

Then again, maybe Seagate used their extra profits from the 10K.6 to fund the build quality of the Barracudas
I'll give it to Topcat too – he was probably right that Fujitsu made the best SCSI drives.

[LongRunner]

VIA = Very Intractable Ailment or Valve-Inferior Aging (yes, they really were that short-lived)

Their chipsets gave me one malfunction after another – the KT600's first RAM slot dying (on two different boards – an MSI KT6V and ECS KT600-A), both the original VT8237 and VT8237R dropping HDDs (including SATA!) down to PIO mode 0 for no good reason (no reported UDMA CRC errors), USB ports also dying on the VT8237 (to think the PCI card I added to replace them was itself VIA‑based ) plus various miscellaneous unexplained errors.

So AMD sorely regretted leaning on VIA so heavily during the Athlon era; sure the Pentium 4 (and especially its Celeron relatives) was an inferior CPU, but at least it had Intel's own chipsets (which held together, by and large, even if that's more than could be said for Intel Desktop Boards overall ).

And for the KT600 northbridge chip specifically: Kamikaze Times 600
(VIA chipsets were already bad – the KT333 and PM133 both infamous for coming with undersized heatsinks – but the KT600 was truly abysmal )

I think it's no accident that the KT600 came out in 2003 alongside Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 9 (rather DiamondCrash Minus 9 given its deliberately-falsified start/stop rating) and the toasty, Fuhjyyu-ridden, doomed Antec PSUs – ethics in hardware manufacturing took a nosedive after IBM's post-Deathstar FUD
(At least my own 2004 shitbox had the trusty ST380011A; and its own AOpen-branded FSP PSU, while probably with a few Fuhjyyus, didn't grill into oblivion – although its Protechnic sleeve‑bearing fan did seize, this blew the switching transistors and fuse before the capacitors could be totally destroyed…)

Red Hill couldn't have been more right to trust their instinct; although persistently holding onto their grudge (against the U Series) did forfeit them of the bulletproof Barracuda 7200.7 and extraordinary 7200.8 (which by their own admission, Samsung couldn't match), it was still easily worth it to have avoided the unmitigated horror of the DiamondCrash drives (which would have landed at their rock-bottom “BA” rating, no ifs or buts about it).